Tumblr: Of course, my lovely. How long? One hour, two hours?

Ao3 : Actually... Probably most of the day. The doctor estimated it at 20 hours.

Tumblr: 20 HOURS?!!!

Ao3: It could be less! But, yes. 20 hours give or take.

Tumblr: Must you ?

Ao3: Would you rather have me falling ill and collapsing?

Tumblr: Of course not! But 20 hours... What am I supposed to do with the kids all this time?

Ao3: *Blushing* well I didn't want to tell you I'd be back too early or I might've disappointed the kids.

Tumblr: They'll be happy to see you dear.

Ao3: *Being stampeded by said children* Yes, yes they definitely seemed to miss me.

Tumblr: *Watching, amused* They really don't like it when you leave. They've spent all 11 hours and 21 minutes crying to me about it.

Ao3: Well I needed to get my collection tags worked on some time, you must understand they've really been getting on my nerves dear.

Tumblr: Of course my Love.

The palpable anger here is a little soothing. Good writing over at Defector.

What is skepticism? In my lifetime as a word-nerd, I have known "skepticism" to refer to a sort of stubborn insistence upon rigor and evidence in place of things like dogma and "common sense." A skeptic, by those terms, is someone who questions what they are told. Crucially, a skeptic actually questions, as in seeks answers. A person who merely refuses to learn what can be known is not a skeptic, but rather an ignoramus; a person who raises questions but does not seek their answers is not a skeptic, but a bullshitter. A person who rejects empirical knowledge, who refuses the answers that exist while requesting ones more to their liking that flatter their preference for unfounded contrarian gibberish and conspiratorial paranoia, is not a skeptic. They're the exact opposite of that: a mark. A sucker. A credulous boob.

[…]

At any rate, "vaccine skeptic" certainly is nicer and less contentious than calling Kennedy a motivated bullshitter, a peddler of antiscientific garbage, the type of dogshit-brained imbecile who will stiff-arm all that can be learned from centuries of medical research and practice because he preferred what he learned from a 25-second TikTok video made by a spiral-eyed homeschool casualty who'll be hospitalized next month with an illness that hasn't sickened a human being since the Bronze Age.

[…]

When I was in first grade, he took me shopping for new school clothes — which was huge because, as the youngest of six kids, I lived in hand-me-downs.

He bought me a little navy blue, polka dot dress with a Peter Pan collar and red alphabet buttons. But, on picture day, I lost one of the buttons on the playground. I had a total meltdown because my brother spent his own money to make sure I had this new dress and I ruined it. I was a mess, totally inconsolable.

My teacher was also the mom of one of my brother’s best friends. She told him, and he, my brother and the entire football team searched the playground after practice for my lost button. Which they actually found.

My brother sewed the button back on himself in the car all while trying to explain that he wouldn’t have been mad even if I did lose it.

It was just a button and a dress.

Musk bought Twitter because he fucked around and found out. He wanted to fuck with Twitter's stock price by feigning interest in buying it. Since that's illegal, he was then cornered into actually buying it for an insanely inflated price.

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

In 1933 African American linguist Lorenzo Turner and musicologist Lydia Parish visited Harris Neck and recorded 53-year-old Amelia Dawley singing a song that had been taught to her by her mother.  The song, in a language unknown to Mrs. Dawley, had been passed down in her family from mother to daughter as far back as anyone in Harris Neck could remember.

In 1997 Amelia’s daughter, Mary Moran, and other members of the Moran family were invited to Sierra Leone, West Africa, where they were welcomed in Freetown by Sierra Leone’s President and then flown by helicopter to the country’s interior.  There, in the small village of Senehun Ngola, Mary and Bendu Jabati met and sang this song together for the first time.  Years earlier, Bendu’s grandmother had told her that this song, which had been passed down in her village from mother to daughter for centuries, would one day reunite her to long-lost relatives.

Through a series of amazing and perhaps miraculous events – and lots of hard work – beginning in the late 1980s, anthropologist  Joseph Opala first rediscovered this song and then, with the help of musicologist Cynthia Schmidt and others, traced the song from Senehun Ngola to Harris Neck